The ships now went twelve miles up the Rio d'Ouro, cast anchor, and waited seven days without a sign of anybody, but on the eighth there came a Moor, on top of a white camel, with fully one hundred others who had all joined to ransom the two boys. Ten of the tribe were given in exchange for the young chiefs, "and the man who managed this barter was one Martin Fernandez, the Infant's own Ransomer of Captives, who shewed well that he had knowledge of the Moorish tongue, for he was understood by those people whom Nuno Tristam's Arab, Moor though he was by nation, could not possibly get speech with, except only the one chief, who had now escaped."
With the "Blackamoors," Antam Gonsalvez got as ransom what was even more precious, a little gold dust, the first ever brought by Europeans direct from the Guinea Coast, which more thoroughly won the Prince's cause at home and brought over more enemies and scoffers and indifferentists to his side than all the discoveries in the world.
"Many ostrich eggs, too," were included in the native ransom, "such that one day men saw at the Infant's table three dishes of the same, as fresh and as good as those of any other domestic fowls." Did the Court of Sagres suppose the ostrich to be some large kind of hen?
What was still more to the Prince's mind, "those same Moors related, that in those parts there were merchants who trafficked in that gold that was found there among them"—the same merchants, in fact, whose caravels Henry had already known on the Mediterranean coast, and whose starting-point he had now begun to touch. Ever since the days of the first Caliphs, this Sahara commerce had gone on under the control of Islam; for centuries these caravans had crossed the valleys and plains to the south of Morocco and sold their goods—pepper, slaves, and gold dust—in Moslem Ceuta and Moslem Andalusia; now, after seven hundred years of monopoly, this Moslem trade was broken in upon by the Europeans, who, in fifty years' time, broke into the greater monopoly of the Indian Seas, when Da Gama sailed from Lisbon to Malabar (1497-9).
Next year (1443) came Nuno Tristam's turn once more. People were now eager to sail in the Infant's service, after the slaves, and still more the gold dust, had been really seen and handled in Portugal, and "that noble cavalier," for each and all of the three reasons of his fellows—"to serve his lord," "to gain honour," "to increase his profit,"—was eager to follow up his first successes.
Commanding a caravel manned in great part from the Prince's household, he went out straight to Cape Blanco, the white headland, which he had been the first to reach in 1441. Passing twenty-five leagues, seventy-five miles beyond, into the bank or bight of Arguin, he saw a little island, from which twenty-five canoes came off to meet him, all hollowed out of logs of wood, with a host of native savages, "naked not for swimming in the water, but for their ancient custom." The natives hung their legs over the sides of their boats, and paddled with them like oars, so that "our men, looking at them from a distance and quite unused to the sight, thought they were birds that were skimming so over the water." As for their size, the sailors expected much greater marvels in those parts of the world, where every map and traveller's tale made the sea swarm with monsters as big as a continent.
"But as soon as they saw they were men, then were their hearts full of a new pleasure, for that they saw the chance of a capture." They launched the ship's boat at once, chased them to the shore, and captured fourteen; if the boat had been stronger, the tale would have been longer, for with a crew of seven they could not hold any more prisoners, and so the rest escaped.
With this booty they sailed on to another island, "where they found an infinite number of herons, of which they made good cheer, and so returned Nuno Tristam very joyfully to the Prince."
This last piece of discovery was of much more value than Nuno thought. He saw in it a first-rate slave hunting-ground, but it became the starting-point for trade and intercourse with the Negro States of the Senegal and the Gambia, to the south and east. It was here, in the bay of Arguin, where the long desert coast of the Sahara makes its last bend towards the rich country of the south,—that Henry built in 1448 that fort which Cadamosto found, in the next ten years, had become the centre of a great European commerce, which was also among the first permanent settlements of the new Christian exploration, one of the first steps of modern colonisation.
And now the volunteer movement had fairly begun. Where in the beginning, says Azurara, people had murmured very loudly against the Prince's enterprise, each one grumbling as if the Infant was spending some part of his property, now when the way had been fairly opened and the fruits of those lands began to be seen in Portugal in much greater abundance, men began, softly enough, to praise what they had so loudly decried. Great and small alike had declared that no profit would ever come of these ventures, but when the cargoes of slaves and gold began to arrive, all were forced to turn their blame into flattery, and to say that the Infant was another Alexander the Great, and as they saw the houses of others full of new servants from the new discovered lands and their property always increasing, there were few who did not long to try their fortune in the same adventures.